This invention relates to a communication apparatus and method capable of transmitting information to another party by facsimile communication or communication using electronic mail.
The increasing use of electronic mail over the Internet in recent years has led to the appearance even of facsimile machines that can be connected to the Internet or to a LAN to make possible the sending and receiving of electronic mail.
Maintaining the security of document information sent and received by facsimile is a concern. Since facsimile communication via an ordinary public telephone network involves a direct one-on-one connection between the communicating parties via the network, the degree of security in terms of the communication path is comparatively high. However, once the faxed documents have been received by the facsimile machine on the receiving side, the received information is, as a rule, printed out by the receiving facsimile machine. The degree of security on the receiving side, therefore, is comparatively low.
A solution has been to use a confidential message-box function to assure secrecy. This function involves the sending side notifying the receiving side of the fact that a confidential transmission is to be made, accumulating the received documents in a confidential message box on the receiving side and outputting the documents on the receiving side only when a correct secret number has been entered.
Conversely, with regard to electronic mail sent over the Internet, mail arrives at the communicating party on the receiving side via a number of unspecified routers and mail servers, etc., that constitute the network, and ASCII character codes are exchanged over this communication path as is. The degree of security in this case, therefore, is comparatively low. However, because an electronic mail scheme comes equipped with a mailbox function, the degree of security of received documents once they have arrived at the receiving party is high.
Thus, the security of documents communicated by facsimile differs greatly from that communicated by electronic mail. In order to assure an equivalent degree of security for both kinds of communication with the conventional apparatus of the type described above, the user must perform different communication operations upon being sufficiently aware of the difference in security of both kinds of communication.